Projekt Phoenix in Germany

12.08.2018

The end of May 2018 marked a breakthrough for Germany in the availability of UFO-related publications, which has remained almost unnoticed in this country – as part of "Project Phoenix" initiated by Isaac Koi.

Isaac Koi is a barrister in England who since 2013 has done outstanding work to enable the release of numerous older UFO-related publications. Thanks to his effort, for thousands of pages of hundreds of different UFO publications from all over the world permissions have been granted, they have been scanned and made freely accessible over the years. The Swedish organisation AFU - Archives for the Unexplained, which has one of the largest archives on UFOs and borderline sciences worldwide at its disposal and to which numerous internationally renowned UFO researchers donated their own archives, is involved in this work. The AFU has established its own working group to support the release of the publications in cooperation with Isaac Koi.

Whenever he achieved permission and scans of another publication to upload it to the AFU pages, Isaac Koi reports this in the Above Top Secret Forum, on his Facebook page and on some UFO mailing lists.

Towards the end of 2017, the announcement of "Project Phoenix" arrived, initially planned as a week-long collaborative work by various UFO groups and researchers to search further archives, scan material and obtain permission to release it, so that they can contribute to the body of material accessible to research on the UFO topic.

Worldwide well-known researchers such as James Carrion, David Clarke, Tony Eccles, Mikhail Gershtein, Kit Green, Barry Greenwood, Dick Haines, Igor Kalytyuk, Bruce Maccabee, Lance Moody, James Oberg, Tim Printy, Hal Puthoff, Jenny Randles, Edoardo Russo, John Schuessler, Jacques Scornaux and many more publicly supported the project with the following statement: "We consider that making source materials about reports of 'UFOs' (including official documents, periodicals and relevant audio recordings) easily and freely available online is likely to contribute to the study of relevant physical, historical, psychological and sociological issues. If you are able to help with digitisation projects such as the one being conducted by the AFU in Sweden, we would appreciate you doing so".

From April 2018 onwards, the originally planned one-week project became an ongoing project, as various contacts in numerous EU countries broadened the work to include numerous non-English publications. For Germany, the author of this article contacted Isaac Koi and coordinated contributions from the UFO organizations and individual researchers. The interim results are now available at the AFU website files.afu.se/Downloads/Magazines/Germany in searchable PDF format:

Bilk: magazine by Ulrich Magin, 80 issues

CENAP-Newsflash: 26 issues

CENAP-Report: 286 issues

DEGUFORUM: all 90 issues

Hangar 18: magazine by Christian Czech, 5 issues

Journal für UFO-Forschung - jufof: issues 1-204

MUFON-CES-Berichte: 11 book publications

Mysteria: magazine by Axel Ertelt, 58 issues

PEGAP Info: 7 issues

UFO-Information: magazine by CENAP Heilbronn, 25 issues

Der UFO-Student: magazine by T.A. Günter, 5 issues

UFO and PSI Magazine: magazine by Christian Pfeiler, 13 issues

Examples of German UFO magazines which can now be downloaded in PDF format at the AFU website

All three UFO organizations of the German Cooperation Initiative and other organisations and researchers from Germany participated in the release of material.

Many of the publications could be made directly available in the form of scans already done in Germany (especially by the GEP and by UFO-Information.de), so that the coordination between Isaac Koi and Danny Ammon avoided any duplicate work of additional scanning.

For some publications, e.g. CENAP-Report, further issues are currently being scanned and then uploaded. With the transition to a yearbook from 2017 at DEGUFO, the upload of the DEGUFORUM is complete. For the Journal für UFO-Forschung the GEP has decided to make all issues available regularly via the AFU website except for the last 5 years, so that e.g. volume 34 (2013) will be uploaded towards the end of this year.

One effect of releasing such valuable material that should not be underestimated is that they offer an answer to the question: "Is UFO research (still) being conducted in country X? Due to the language barrier and the rarely international work of German-speaking UFO organizations (beyond this bilingual blog), the work of Isaac Koi and the AFU do quite easily show:
Yes, UFO research is conducted in Germany!